BasharOfTheAges wrote:The footage in question, for me at least, is Soul Eater, which was aired in HD, but hasn't even been released in BRD in Japan yet - I assume because they backed HD-DVD and they legally can't as part of some contract.

It would appear that it is going to be released on Blu-ray, although not until early next year. I suspected something like that because it's getting rebroadcast this season (not that rebroadcasting is at all uncommon, but with a Blu-ray release looming it looks more like the rebroadcast is a primer).

Unless of course that 'yet' had the above two sets in mind, rather than being a hypothetical 'yet'. In that case, ignore this post.

Of course... As soon as i drop the money on the DVDs... o.o;; Oh well, I helped a friend out by buying them from his store - sure i can give them away as prizes at some point too. Those prices are retarded though. I'm sure as hell not dropping over $600 for a single show on BRD.

@ngsilver - they're doing it that way to respect your wishes in showing it at the resolution you sent it in as. If you had wanted it upscaled, you'd have done it yourself.

That's actually almost cheap for Japanese standards. We generally talk about 300 or 400 USD for a 12 episodes or so series. So 600 USD for 51 eps is kinda cheap in comparison, yes. Hell, these boxes even come with English subtitles, that would be almost worth an extra!

Oh yeah, that is a viable way too... And English subs in official BD BOX releases aren't all that uncommon. We've seen it with Kanon, Clannad, and Haruhi before, for example. Haruhi even has the English audio track. Hell, think about the Black Rock Shooter DVD: it is official and it comes with subs in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and I might be forgetting something else too.

I would guess part of the tendency of some Japanese BRD releases to have English subtitles and/or audio comes by way of the fact that Blu-ray specs put Japan and North America in the same region, and thus the Japanese companies can stand to profit directly from American consumers (if the region coding is used at all; the situation with Blu-ray region coding seems a lot more like the companies are going with 'why even bother?' than the near-ubiquitous region coding on DVDs, at least from what I'm seeing reported second-hand). It does make sense - there's really no better way to help recoup losses on the native anime industry from the international economy going down the crapper than by having official releases with saleability over a larger region (even if it's only a niche market inside the even more niche market of North American anime fans that would actually import Japanese Blu-rays...but having English sub/audio tracks gives those buyers more incentive).

So it takes some back-licensing from the North American companies to get their subs/audio tracks - in the event the series was already released there - or they do the English translations in-house.